February 17, 1776: "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" Is Published

Edward Gibbon

Common Sense by Thomas Paine wasn't the only important piece of writing to be published in 1776, the year of American independence -- which, of course, depended on an important piece of writing, which Common Sense helped to set up. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith turned out to be pretty important.

But that was for the present and the future. There was also a very important book about the past, which contained warnings for the present and the future. And it had the same publisher as The Wealth of Nations:

February 17, 1776: Volume I of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is published in London by Strahan and Cadell. It becomes the biggest-selling work of history in history.

It was reissued in a succession of 6 revised editions between 1776 and 1789. Volumes II and III appeared in 1781, and the final three volumes -- IV, V and VI -- were issued together in 1788.

Edward Gibbon was born on May 8, 1737 in Putney, then in Surrey, now a part of South-West London. He attended a boarding school run by Catherine Porten, known to her students as "Aunt Kitty." Gibbon later wrote that it was she who gave him "the first rudiments of knowledge, the first exercise of reason, and a taste for books which is still the pleasure and glory of my life."

Included among these books was An Universal history, from the earliest account of time. Compiled from original authors; and illustrated with maps, cuts, notes, &c. With a general index to the whole. This was a 65-volume universal history of the world published in London between 1747 and 1768. It was one of the first works to attempt to unify the history of Western Europe with the stories of the known world.

He enrolled at Oxford University, left without graduating, and spent time in France and Switzerland, where the only major romance of his life happened, with a woman named Suzanne Curchod. But his wealthy father, a staunch Protestant, threatened to cut him off if he married Suzanne, a Catholic. Edward wrote, "I sighed as a love, but I obeyed as a son." She later married an official in the French government, and died during, but not as a result of, the French Revolution.

Gibbon published a study of literature, establishing his reputation as a writer, and served in the Seven Years' War (known in America as the French and Indian War). This service gave him a greater understanding of military life, ancient as well as current. He visited Rome, and gave it the nickname by which it would be known thereafter: "The Eternal City." He wrote:

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.

He returned to London in June 1765, and inherited his father's vast estate in 1770. His literary output led him to meet the leading man of letters in Britain at the time, Dr. Samuel Johnson, joining his Literary Club; and also Johnson's publishers, Strahan and Cadell. William Strahan (1715-1785) was Scottish, served in Britain's House of Commons, and was a friend and correspondent of Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Cadell (1742-1802) was from Bristol, in England's West Country. Each man's son continued the family business for a while after the father's death.

In 1771, Strahan and Cadell published The Man of Feeling, a novel of moral philosophy by Henry Mackenzie, establishing their reputation as well as his, making it possible to take them seriously when they published the works of Gibbon, Smith, Johnson, Scottish philosopher David Hume, Scottish poet Robert Burns, and others. Cadell was quoted as saying, "I had rather risk my fortune with a few such Authors as Mr Gibbon, Dr Robertson, D Hume … than be the publisher of a hundred insipid publications."

In 1774, Gibbon was elected to Parliament from Liskeard, in Cornwall, in the West Country, and remained in that seat until losing in 1780. In 1781, he won a seat in Lymington, in Hampshire on the South Coast, and held that seat until 1784. (It Britain, it is hardly unusual for a Member of Parliament to represent different constituencies in his or her career. Winston Churchill, himself a historian when he wasn't politicking, had 5 different constituencies over his 64 years in the Commons.)

Gibbon's initial plan was to write a history "of the decline and fall of the city of Rome," and only later expanded his scope to the whole Roman Empire. He leaned heavily on the French writers who became usually known as Montesquieu (a baronial title) and Voltaire (a pen name).

Although he published other books, Gibbon devoted much of his life to this one work. His autobiography, published after his death as Memoirs of My Life and Writings, was devoted largely to his reflections on how the book virtually became his life. He compared the publication of each succeeding volume to a newborn child.

The six volumes cover, from AD 98 to 1590, the peak of the Roman Empire, the history of early Christianity and its ermergence as the Roman state religion in the early 4th Century AD, the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476, the rise of Genghis Khan in the early 13th Century and Tamerlane in the late 14th Century, and the fall of Constantinople and thus the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire in 1453, which triggered the shifting of Europe's gaze from East to West, and thus the Age of Exploration.

(By concluding with 1590, it was as if someone in 2026 were writing about Gibbon's own time as the conclusion of a long study.)

According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire succumbed to "barbarian" invasions in large part due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens. He began an ongoing controversy about the role of Christianity, but he gave great weight to other causes of internal decline and to attacks from outside the Empire.

Like other Enlightenment thinkers, many of them not so enlightened on the subject of Roman Catholicism, Gibbon held in contempt the Middle Ages -- usually defined as the time from the fall of the Western Empire until the fall of Constantinople -- as a priest-ridden, superstitious Dark Age. It was not until his own era, the "Age of Reason," with its emphasis on rational thought, he believed, that human history could resume its progress.

Gibbon suffered from gout, and from a rather embarrassing condition that left him with enlarged and painful testicles. Surgery to correct this in 1794 failed, resulting in peritonitis, which killed him at the age of 56.

Many writers have used variations on the series title, usually shortened to "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," including using "Rise and Fall" in place of "Decline and Fall." These include William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and David Bowie's album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. (What Bowie made of what happened to Gibbon, only he knew.)